The Vanishing
After watching an hour and twenty minutes of this film, I began to wonder why this was being billed as one of the best horror movies around. Ever since my friend Jimmy (Darrah, a brilliant filmmaker in his own right) showed me Eli Roth's film Hostel, I have been absolutely obsessed with finding movies that make me feel nervous, uncomfortable, and just plain fucking scared! I want that reaction I get when I watch a Takashi Miike movie. I don't necessarily have to be scared, but I want to squirm in my seat. Like in his film Imprint, which he did for Shotime's "Masters of Horror" series. His episode was deemed "too extreme for television." After downloading it and watching it, I could see why. I squirmed, I turned away, I screamed and let out noises of disgust. There's just something about seeing needles going into that space between the fingernail and the skin, and then seeing the area beneath the nail fill with blood, that makes me have those reactions. In short, I feel like I'm in a rut. Watching art films and classics is nice, and it's a necessary part of my life...a part of my life that I have been dilluting with trash movies, just to offset the way I see movies. And now, the new sensation is horror.
So, watching George Sluizer's original 1988 version of The Vanishing, I couldn't figure out how it was a horror film. What I was watching was a superbly crafted and atmospheric mystery/thriller. The set-up goes like this. Rex and his girlfriend Saskia are going on summer holiday. They have left their home in Amsterdam to go cycling in France. After seeing the happy couple driving together, we see Saskia getting nervous about the fuel meter. Rex assures her that they are fine, and then they run out of gas right in the middle of a long tunnel. Saskia starts freaking out, trying to find the flashlight that she packed, and Rex refuses to put up with her fussing and leaves to get gas. He returns with a gas can, and Saskia is missing from the car. He drives out of the tunnel to find Saskia standing on the side of the road, clutching the flashlight. She makes him promise that he will never abandon her again, and he promises. The two come to a gas station to fill the car up, and this is where the film took an interesting turn, or at least I thought. I had expected to see a movie that focused on a guy trying to figure out who kidnapped his wife, but as soon as they get to the gas station, we see a man putting on a fake cast and sling, and we know that he is going to be responsible for the vanishing that the film's title suggests. Saskia goes into the station to use the restroom, and we see the man with the cast follow her in. Saskia returns, another false alarm. She and Rex sit in the grass, and Saskia stresses that he needs to never abandon her again. They get ready to leave, but she wants to go buy a couple of cold drinks for the road, and she never returns. We see some backstory of how the man with the cast, Raymond Lemorne, came to the gas station and then the film cuts to a poster being put up on a light post. On it is a picture of Saskia and it says that she has been missing for three years.
The rest of the film is spent equally following the lives of Rex, who is desperately trying to find out what happened to Saskia, and Lemorne, who sends Rex postcards telling him to meet him, never to show up. Rex has a new girlfriend, but just won't let go. He needs to know what happened to his girlfriend, or his friend, as he refers to her for the rest of the film. He has hundreds and thousands of dollars in debts, money that he has spent trying to unsolve this mystery. We learn that Lemorne is a claustrophobic professor in chemistry, has a wife and two daughters, and a seemingly normal life. After seeing Rex giving his plea on television, he decides to confront him. Rex, desperate for answers, goes with Lemorne to France. On the way, we learn Lemorne's motives. As a boy, while standing on the balcony of his house which overlooked the street, he tells how he fought the normal impulse to not jump and jumped, breaking his arm. He is, as medical textbooks would later state, an example of a "sociopath." He then tells of how, while on vacation with his family, he saved a young girl from drowning and was seen as a hero and idolized by his younget daughter. It was then that he decided he needed to commit the most evil act possible to counter this. To prove something to himself.
We learn more and more about Lemorne, and are given subtle clues and references to fate that will play into the absolutely CHILLING finale. I swear, like The Wicker Man and Hostel, this is a film that slowly builds and builds and finally, pulls the rug out from under you. THAT is the kind of stuff that I crave. Lemorne drives Rex to the gas station where Saskia disappeared, and tells him to drink some drugged coffee if he wants to find out what happened to her. He says that he will experience exactly what she went through, which he calls the worst thing that he could do to somebody. It could be anything, and she could still be alive for all we know. It's everything that a climax should be, and making the decision proves to be the hardest decision that Rex has ever had to make. How far will his need to know take him? I'll post the secret invisibly, so here we go:
Rex drinks the coffee and they leave the station. He awakens in a coffin, underground...buried alive. To Lemorne, a claustrophobic, the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be being buried alive. But holy shit, that is the worst thing that could happen to ANYONE and while we are in the box with Rex, who uses a lighter to see inside, this scares the living hell out of me. I flinched and shivered. It was an extremely uncomfortable place and that shift in tone, when a mystery becomes a horror film shook me up. And then we see Lemorne, sitting at his home, his family playing in the yard, staring coldly out into the world.
I didn't see the ending coming, and that is what makes this a really great mystery/thriller/horror. The clues are all there, and they all come together at the end. And speaking of the end, the director remade his own movie five years later...for American audiences...with Keifer Sutherland, Sandra Bullock, and Jeff Bridges. And guess what, he botched his own ending, copped out, and adapted it for Hollywood with the rest of the film. It made me sick just reading it, because it takes away everything that makes this movie so great. It's an inevitible ending, the film HAS to end the way it does. If not, well, you blew it. BUT, the first time around was a rousing success! Granted, I pretty much hated the score, which sounded like it was composed with effects on a cheap Casio keyboard, but that's just personal taste I'm sure. Other than that, this is a great film. You don't know it until the end, but the whole film is based not only in Lemorne's sociopathic behavior of NEEDING to do what he does, but it is based on fate as well. Simply put, that is how the film turns out the way it does. Little instances that we don't notice, or little character quirks and things like your love and selflessness for somebody else ultimately being what tears your apart.
After watching an hour and twenty minutes of this film, I began to wonder why this was being billed as one of the best horror movies around. Ever since my friend Jimmy (Darrah, a brilliant filmmaker in his own right) showed me Eli Roth's film Hostel, I have been absolutely obsessed with finding movies that make me feel nervous, uncomfortable, and just plain fucking scared! I want that reaction I get when I watch a Takashi Miike movie. I don't necessarily have to be scared, but I want to squirm in my seat. Like in his film Imprint, which he did for Shotime's "Masters of Horror" series. His episode was deemed "too extreme for television." After downloading it and watching it, I could see why. I squirmed, I turned away, I screamed and let out noises of disgust. There's just something about seeing needles going into that space between the fingernail and the skin, and then seeing the area beneath the nail fill with blood, that makes me have those reactions. In short, I feel like I'm in a rut. Watching art films and classics is nice, and it's a necessary part of my life...a part of my life that I have been dilluting with trash movies, just to offset the way I see movies. And now, the new sensation is horror.
So, watching George Sluizer's original 1988 version of The Vanishing, I couldn't figure out how it was a horror film. What I was watching was a superbly crafted and atmospheric mystery/thriller. The set-up goes like this. Rex and his girlfriend Saskia are going on summer holiday. They have left their home in Amsterdam to go cycling in France. After seeing the happy couple driving together, we see Saskia getting nervous about the fuel meter. Rex assures her that they are fine, and then they run out of gas right in the middle of a long tunnel. Saskia starts freaking out, trying to find the flashlight that she packed, and Rex refuses to put up with her fussing and leaves to get gas. He returns with a gas can, and Saskia is missing from the car. He drives out of the tunnel to find Saskia standing on the side of the road, clutching the flashlight. She makes him promise that he will never abandon her again, and he promises. The two come to a gas station to fill the car up, and this is where the film took an interesting turn, or at least I thought. I had expected to see a movie that focused on a guy trying to figure out who kidnapped his wife, but as soon as they get to the gas station, we see a man putting on a fake cast and sling, and we know that he is going to be responsible for the vanishing that the film's title suggests. Saskia goes into the station to use the restroom, and we see the man with the cast follow her in. Saskia returns, another false alarm. She and Rex sit in the grass, and Saskia stresses that he needs to never abandon her again. They get ready to leave, but she wants to go buy a couple of cold drinks for the road, and she never returns. We see some backstory of how the man with the cast, Raymond Lemorne, came to the gas station and then the film cuts to a poster being put up on a light post. On it is a picture of Saskia and it says that she has been missing for three years.
The rest of the film is spent equally following the lives of Rex, who is desperately trying to find out what happened to Saskia, and Lemorne, who sends Rex postcards telling him to meet him, never to show up. Rex has a new girlfriend, but just won't let go. He needs to know what happened to his girlfriend, or his friend, as he refers to her for the rest of the film. He has hundreds and thousands of dollars in debts, money that he has spent trying to unsolve this mystery. We learn that Lemorne is a claustrophobic professor in chemistry, has a wife and two daughters, and a seemingly normal life. After seeing Rex giving his plea on television, he decides to confront him. Rex, desperate for answers, goes with Lemorne to France. On the way, we learn Lemorne's motives. As a boy, while standing on the balcony of his house which overlooked the street, he tells how he fought the normal impulse to not jump and jumped, breaking his arm. He is, as medical textbooks would later state, an example of a "sociopath." He then tells of how, while on vacation with his family, he saved a young girl from drowning and was seen as a hero and idolized by his younget daughter. It was then that he decided he needed to commit the most evil act possible to counter this. To prove something to himself.
We learn more and more about Lemorne, and are given subtle clues and references to fate that will play into the absolutely CHILLING finale. I swear, like The Wicker Man and Hostel, this is a film that slowly builds and builds and finally, pulls the rug out from under you. THAT is the kind of stuff that I crave. Lemorne drives Rex to the gas station where Saskia disappeared, and tells him to drink some drugged coffee if he wants to find out what happened to her. He says that he will experience exactly what she went through, which he calls the worst thing that he could do to somebody. It could be anything, and she could still be alive for all we know. It's everything that a climax should be, and making the decision proves to be the hardest decision that Rex has ever had to make. How far will his need to know take him? I'll post the secret invisibly, so here we go:
Rex drinks the coffee and they leave the station. He awakens in a coffin, underground...buried alive. To Lemorne, a claustrophobic, the worst thing that could ever happen to him would be being buried alive. But holy shit, that is the worst thing that could happen to ANYONE and while we are in the box with Rex, who uses a lighter to see inside, this scares the living hell out of me. I flinched and shivered. It was an extremely uncomfortable place and that shift in tone, when a mystery becomes a horror film shook me up. And then we see Lemorne, sitting at his home, his family playing in the yard, staring coldly out into the world.
I didn't see the ending coming, and that is what makes this a really great mystery/thriller/horror. The clues are all there, and they all come together at the end. And speaking of the end, the director remade his own movie five years later...for American audiences...with Keifer Sutherland, Sandra Bullock, and Jeff Bridges. And guess what, he botched his own ending, copped out, and adapted it for Hollywood with the rest of the film. It made me sick just reading it, because it takes away everything that makes this movie so great. It's an inevitible ending, the film HAS to end the way it does. If not, well, you blew it. BUT, the first time around was a rousing success! Granted, I pretty much hated the score, which sounded like it was composed with effects on a cheap Casio keyboard, but that's just personal taste I'm sure. Other than that, this is a great film. You don't know it until the end, but the whole film is based not only in Lemorne's sociopathic behavior of NEEDING to do what he does, but it is based on fate as well. Simply put, that is how the film turns out the way it does. Little instances that we don't notice, or little character quirks and things like your love and selflessness for somebody else ultimately being what tears your apart.
posted by Ian at 1:04 AM
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